Robot Learning Course

Politecnico di Torino

Course Description

This course will provide foundational knowledge on intelligent systems and their high-level control, aimed at developing robots with embodied intelligence able to learn and interact with their environment. Lectures focus on machine learning solutions for autonomous systems, especially Reinforcement and Imitation Learning techniques.

Link to this page

Teachers

Giuseppe Averta

Francesca Pistilli

Andrea Protopapa

Davide Buoso

Weekly Course Schedule

Day Activity Time
Monday Lecture 16:00 - 19:00
Thursday Lecture 10:00 - 11:30
To Be Scheduled Laboratory Session 1.5 hours

Course Modules

Robotics Survival Kit (approx. 10h)

Intro to Reinforcement Learning

Value-based RL

Policy Gradients

Model-based RL

Bandits, Exploration/Exploitation

Supervised RL

Advanced topics

Labs (15h)

Resources & Textbooks

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Sutton & Barto (Classic RL textbook)

Deep Learning

Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville (Classic DL textbook)

Robotics Modelling, Planning and Control

Siciliano et al. (Robotics fundamentals)

Probabilistic Robotics

Thrun et al. (Uncertainty in Robotics)

Gymnasium

RL Environments collection

PyTorch

Deep Learning Framework

Stable Baselines3

RL Algorithms in PyTorch

OpenAI Spinning Up

RL Educational Resource

David Silver’s RL Course

DeepMind lectures and notes

Berkeley Deep RL Bootcamp

Full course material and videos

Berkeley Deep RL Bootcamp Resources

GitHub Homework & Examples

Dopamine

Google Research RL Framework

Weekly Lecture Schedule & Materials

Links for slides will work only if you are logged in with your PoliTo credentials. You can find lectures recordings on the university portal approx 1 day after the lecture.

Week Day Time Topic Covered Slides Material
1 Mon 22/09/25 16:00 - 17:30 L0: Intro to Robot Learning Course
1 Mon 22/09/25 17:30 - 19:00 L1: Foundations of sensing & actuation
1 Thu 25/09/25 10:30 - 12:00 L2a: Kinematics of Robot Manipulators - pt1
2 Mon 29/09/25 16:00 - 17:30 L2a: Kinematics of Robot Manipulators - pt2
2 Mon 29/09/25 17:30 - 19:00 L2b: Dynamics of Robot Manipulators
2 Thu 02/10/25 10:30 - 12:00 L2c: Mobile Robots - pt1
3 Mon 06/10/25 16:00 - 17:30 L2c: Mobile Robots - pt2
3 Mon 06/10/25 17:30 - 19:00 L4a: Intro to ML and DL - pt1
3 Thu 09/10/25 10:30 - 12:00 L4a: Intro to ML and DL - pt2
4 Mon 13/10/25 16:00 - 19:00 L4b: Intro to Reinforcement Learning
4 Thu 16/10/25 10:30 - 12:00 L5a: Markov Decision Processes
5 Mon 20/10/25 16:00 - 19:00 L3 Motor control - pt1 (online)
5 Thu 23/10/25 10:30 - 12:00 L3 Motor control - pt2 (online)
6 Mon 27/10/25 16:00 - 19:00 TBA
6 TBD TBD Lab Session 1: RL Fundamentals
6 Thu 30/10/25 10:30 - 12:00 TBA